Design and development of nanostructured filter media for VOCs abatement in closed environments

Abstract The presence of volatile organic compounds released at significantly high concentration levels from livelihood sources entails more and more the development of effective active filter media for their control and abatement within indoor environments. Nanostructured nonwoven mats, obtained by combination of electrodynamic technologies (electrospinning and electrospraying), were produced and characterized by SEM and TGA methods. TiO2 was the main photocatalyst, whereas Graphene and cyclodextrins were used as co-catalyst and sorption components, respectively. The photocatalytic activities of all the samples were tested in the gas-phase photocatalytic oxidation (PCO) reaction of acetaldehyde, methanol and n-hexane in a static reactor by the FT-IR in situ method. The influence of the production approach, the chemical structure of the pollutants and the testing unit layouts, were evaluated. Filtering media produced by performing alternatively electrospinning of polymeric support and electrospraying of photocatalyst nanoparticles, led a 96% acetaldehyde (C0 = 133 ppm) abatement after 30 min. with a half time of 9 min. with the PAN + TiO2. Further reduction of the half-time was achieved with a particular corrugated sheets configuration, wherein the testing unit was able to treat 6.4 m3/h of air. The proposed system showed good versatility in terms of photodegradation of different pollutants (methanol and n-hexane) both pure and in mixture.